#writing the past can be hard

I’ve heard a few times now, that Deke’s flashback is one of the preferred chapters in The Spark That Left Us. He’s one of the few characters with an acknowledged back story, a history. Writing events currently happening to your characters is easy. You write it. It happens. You feel that little twist, since you’re responsible for that happening, whether they love or laugh or cry or scream. It’s you. All you.

But when it comes to writing the past, there’s a slew of consequences that follows. If I do this, how do they act now? If I say this, how does the ripple affect every other character in your story, what they do, how they react.

Additional issues, with the mythos that fills The Spark That Left us – is that no one can trust the construct of their reality. Then you end up in a situation where, do they know this even happened? Would they react differently if they knew it did?

So now, while writing (the tentatively titled) Sparks Ignite – although being set in the future, a year onward from the final events of The Spark That Left Us, there has been a backslide into the past, events that shaped where the characters were lined up in order to pursue the events of TSTLU, in order for them to understand what is happening to them now. And I am in constant fear of, what if something happens, something brilliantly important happens – and suddenly casts a shadow over TSTLU?